Geeveston Community Centre, GeCo to the people who use it, is a neighbourhood house in Geeveston, in southern Tasmania’s Huon Valley, and one of 31 across the state. It runs community programs, social activities, and support services for the town and the valley around it, funded through several streams and answerable to a community-led board.
Nicole Watt is its Centre Manager. Her background is in community services, not bookkeeping, and the finance function a neighbourhood house carries is not small: payroll under the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services award, salary packaging, grant income to track against the budget, and a board that needs the numbers in time to read them.
Before Visory
GeCo’s finances sat with one person: a single bookkeeper who worked closely with the manager at the time. When that relationship broke down there was no oversight and no clear trail. The move from MYOB to Xero brought incomplete records across, so the history could not be trusted and the gaps had to be patched by hand.
Reports reached the board too late to be read before meetings, and the board was asking whether the spend on bookkeeping was worth it. Nicole was reviewing everything closely to catch misallocations, on top of running the centre.
“We’ve got to be across so many things as managers in the not-for-profit space already. I don’t have the capacity to wrap my head around payroll and salary sacrificing - I’m just so grateful that’s sorted.”
What Visory runs now
Visory runs GeCo’s bookkeeping, payroll, and board reporting. A dedicated team keeps the books and runs each pay run under the award, salary packaging included, and Delphi AI codes and checks the routine work in the background. Every coding instruction, grant allocation, and expense rule is saved in the platform, so when a transaction comes through, the team is reminded how GeCo allocates it and Nicole does not explain the same thing twice.
Each funding stream is tracked and reported against the operational budget, variance analysis runs in the background, and the monthly reports go to the board on a confirmed delivery calendar.
Before
- One bookkeeper, with no oversight and no clear trail
- Records patchy after the move from MYOB to Xero
- Days waiting for an answer, and no consistent point of contact
- Reports arriving too late for the board to read before meetings
- The Centre Manager checking everything to catch misallocations
After
- A dedicated team with checks built in, and a platform that remembers how GeCo’s accounts work
- Clean books, with variance analysis running in the background
- One contact who knows the accounts, so nothing is explained twice
- A confirmed delivery calendar, with time for the board to prepare
- Oversight without doing the work herself
The decision it enabled
The turning point was a consistent team who knew the accounts well enough to flag things before Nicole saw them. She stopped checking every line, and the hours that went into catching misallocations went back into running the centre.
“What made the difference was having a team who became really familiar with our stuff - and who was able to pick up things that I didn’t necessarily see. Before that, I needed to be across literally everything. I may as well have been doing it myself, because no one else could see when something didn’t make sense. Now I’m confident that if there’s a mistake, it gets picked up. It wasn’t like I had to explain myself every time - oh, remember this transaction, remember that grant - it was just, yep, got it, we’re straight into it. I’m an absolute strong advocate for keeping you on board. It makes my job so much easier. I haven’t had a bookkeeper - I’ve just had you guys - and as far as I’m concerned, it’s fantastic.”
A board that works from the numbers
The board went from questioning the spend to working from the reports. They arrive on a confirmed schedule, the board president reads them before the meeting, and the monthly numbers now sit under the people and resource decisions that matter most in a not-for-profit: whether GeCo can respond to a need in the community as it emerges, put staff on it, and adjust as the month goes. On tight funding there is no margin for a financial error, and the board now makes those calls from numbers it trusts.
“I basically say: yes, they do the bills, yes they do the pay runs, yes they do the tax - the whole works. The back end is out of my mind. I describe you as a one-stop shop.”
Start with your own numbers
If you run a not-for-profit with several funding streams and a board to report to, start with a free financial health check on your own numbers. A senior member of the Visory team will analyse your financials and show you where the finance function can improve, before you commit to anything.
